Opening Reception for FAX

The San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries is proud to host FAX, an evolving exhibition that began in New York in 2009 and has been travelling ever since. The SFAC Galleries invited 20 Bay Area artists to reconceive the fax machine as a thinking and drawing tool. Each participating artist will transmit their fax-based work to the gallery via our working fax lines. The resul... [read more]

Curated by João Ribas

The San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries is proud to host FAX, an evolving exhibition that began in New York in 2009 and has been travelling ever since. The SFAC Galleries invited 20 Bay Area artists to reconceive the fax machine as a thinking and drawing tool. Each participating artist will transmit their fax-based work to the gallery via our working fax lines. The results will be displayed alongside works by artists, graphic designers, architects and other cultural producers from around the globe.

FA, which opened at the Drawing Center in New York in 1999, invites a multigenerational group of artists, architects, designers, scientists, filmmakers and writers to reconceive of the fax machine as a thinking and drawing tool. Participants transmit their fax-based work via the venues’ working fax lines through the duration of the exhibition’s tour. Faxes by nearly 100 participants sent to the initial showing of FAX at The Drawing Center form the core of the exhibition, with each institution inviting additional participants to submit works, which will then be archived to create an evolving document of all participants. Through the infinitely reproducible, yet erratic outcomes of producing works via the fax machine, this show displaces traditional notions of the hand that are still commonly associated with the medium of drawing, and instead foregrounds drawing as a generative process.